foundingGIDE Deliverable D12.1 Tools for ontology and metadata management, and metadata interoperability

Image data is one of the fastest growing types of research data, characterized by rapid advances in imaging technologies and workflows of increasing complexity. This growth places significant pressure on the research community to establish and maintain consistent metadata standards — a task that is technically demanding and requires sustained policy coordination across institutions, platforms, and funding bodies. Metadata harmonisation is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing governance responsibility, and the absence of shared ontological frameworks remains one of the principal obstacles to cross-platform data interoperability.

One of the central aims of the foundingGIDE project is to address this challenge by harmonising image metadata across data repositories at a European and global scale and to provide open and easy-to-use tools for the preclinical imaging community to improve metadata annotation, storage and preclinical image dataset curation.

To this aim, several tools have been developed and provided to the community for metadata curating, for improving findability of open dataset in XNAT repositories and for linking repositories based on the XNAT platform for making datasets more findable and queryable.

This version is pending EC approval.